How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 9/20/2017

It was Festival Fest last week in Austin: Do512 gave away a pair of tickets to a different festival each week day, leading to their highest week of traffic in 9 weeks, their most giveaway entries in a single week ever and their most new email subscribers in a week since SX.

If your metro has tickets to give away (to festivals or other big shows), you should absolutely consider doing your own Festival Fest / daily giveaway campaign. Read this for more info.

Courtney from Do512 noted that this campaign was especially successful because:

• All festival partners had to agree to share their giveaway to be included.
• Do512's team sent emails to the festivals at the beginning of each morning with the exact links to share and instructions for doing so.

doNYC

• Their Meadows Music Festival VIP giveaway, which got dedicated email love from two of doNYC's partners, BrooklynVegan and le poisson rouge, on its way to 10,025 page views.
• 3,545 organic page views on this Little Italy event. (Are you noticing the theme with ethnic celebrations leading to organic victories?)
• 2,556 page views on this Oktoberfest event, 2,022 of which came from doNYC's email (mostly this one). Who doesn't love free beer?

Looking back through their stats, you may have noticed that Portland has stepped up their social growth: In the past year, they've grown their Instagram followers by 181%, their Twitter followers by 152% and their Facebook followers by 92%.

We chatted with Portland's Jason Ricciardi about his process. Here's what he had to say:

• Never rush a single post.
• Do the research, try not to be repetitive or take yourself too seriously
• Make sure you're always tagging as many relevant brands, venues, artists, record labels as possible (anyone who would have a vested interest in sharing the content - not necessarily just clients, either, as this is also a way to get the attention of new followers and potential partnerships)
• Take the time every week to look back at how things performed rather than just being "one and done." AKA, if something isn't working - don't keep doing it.

Social media managers are responsible for courting the entire Internet to want to "marry" who we are and what we stand for, as well as keeping those that already follow us educated and entertained - so it's worth it to take the time to hone in the details and be the experts of everything we're sharing.

• No messy metadata
• No outdated or low-res images
• A good mix of media (images, video, GIFs)
• Enough perspective to keep 'em guessing. (Let's be real: the reason we disconnect and unfollow others most the time are when they're predictable, repetitive, not putting relevant content in front of us, or are all 'Sell, sell, sell!') 

Just because something does well (for example, say, a beautiful image of a landmark on Instagram) doesn't mean run that into the ground and milk it to death. Just make notes and continue exploring what else your metro's audience shows interest in. We're also tastemakers and the 'ambassadors of what's cool' in our city, so it's okay to expand the audiences horizons by posting things that may seem out of the norm - like Chicago sharing the "poop bandit" article or w/e from Colorado. That one-off stuff always helps show you mean more than business, business, business. 

Big thanks to Jason for sharing his wisdom! Keep tabs on the Summit schedule announcement (coming soon) for a social media session featuring Jason and more brilliant minds around the network. In the mean time, we invite you let us know what questions you have as you: